I am beyond happy to announce that I have been awarded an Emerging Professional Scholarship to significantly support our attending and presenting at the prestigious Museum Computer Network 2014 (#MCN2014) annual conference next month in Dallas, Texas.

The FactMiners social-game developers' community will use the ISO-standard Conceptual Reference Model of the international museum community for managing the underlying relationship between digital cultural heritage collection management and hosting a FactMiners Fact Cloud. The best way to make it easy for museums and archives to participate in the FactMiners community, is to provide a state-of-the-art flexible, extensible digital cultural heritage collection management platform.

FactMiners.org is pleased to announce adoption of the Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) of the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The CIDOC-CRM is an 'ontology' for cultural heritage information, in other words it describes in a formal language the concepts and relations relevant to the documentation of cultural heritage. This ISO standard will be used as the reference model for the development of the FactMiners Fact Cloud metamodel that will logically organize the 'facts' to be 'mined' out of our initial project — the digital archive of Softalk magazine — respecting both the elements of its editorial content and the complex document structure of a magazine.

Our goal is to create a crowdsource-powered social gaming community that "comes to play" in museum and archive on-line repositories with the intensity of the multitudes who play Candy Crush or Words With Friends. And by playing FactMiners, this rabid game-playing community will produce two results.

In short, both the means – FactMiner exploratory-learning game-playing – and the ends – the "by-product" generation of the host collection's Fact Cloud – have value in their own right.